m3 – Page 4 – Travels and Trades

Mar 7 – Trade Update

The RUT marches on, it’s now 16% up in 2 weeks. All the trades are suffering. The April ones don’t really need adjusting on the upside but I have to start looking at the lower Rhinos and moving them up. I bought some 1040 Rhinos for April today. On any down move, I’ll take off the equivalent amount of 920s (for something like $1). This will add theta into the trade and hopefully on any pullback we can get back to an even status. Right now we’re down around 6% on the trade (18% leveraged). That’s expected on the upside with a move like this, backtesting this in 2013 yields similar in those big big up months. Not much I really could have done and given the technicals, it wouldn’t have made sense unless in hindsight. The risk profile on the upside isn’t as pronounced as the downside, and I wasn’t in a rush to OVER adjust. I adjusted but maybe not enough. The moves happened quickly right at end of day after my adjustment time and i was slow on the draw on Mar 3 and 4 to further adjust due to the odds of a pull-back. Also patience pays in volatile periods which it was until a week ago. Obviously, this time it didn’t (at least not yet). These trades hurts the balance, it sucks but it should setup a nice trade for the following month being over-extended etc. The March I still have on are getting gobsmacked I am waiting for ANY pullback to get them off, again still limited upside risk but..still can be more painful.

I sort of expected today to be another up-day re momentum and my time frame to exit the existing March and to adjust the April trades are sometime this week but ideally on a fall either before or after the ECB meeting. We’re as over-extended as you can get so I think an uncorrected upside movement of another of above 1.5% is low. I have somewhat limited upside risk but when I say that, I mean in terms of additional losses, the more it gets up the less effective any down move will be in recovering that already existing loss. I am going to try and add more theta to the trade and put some concentration on this tomorrow and Wednesday. If it continues up and there is no pullback, I expect a really shitty month. This is I believe the strongest up move in that duration ever and if it continues, then its truly an historic event. I remain patient, though, stressed as any pullback will now be that much further away from our optimal. Trying to be patience at these nose-bleed levels. I am looking at some creative adjustments now.

Mar 5 – Trade update and Historic run-up

My April trades don’t have that much more upside risk left. They’re all down @ about 5-5.5% on this record 15% move in 15 days. It’s actually a historic move and has broken a few records. A move to about 1100/1105 would bring another 1%/1.5% loss in the trade.

My plan is to add more theta to the trade and hedge the upside a bit with any pull back. I’ll do it in stages. If we get a touch in the 1070s, I’ll add some 1090 or 1100 call BWBs. If we get another touch in the 1060s, I’ll add more 1080 BWBs and so on. I won’t go too far out (probably 20 points above) and try beefing up the theta in the area and hoping for some decent pullback so we have a chance to break even or profit. If by Tuesday, there is no pullback, I’ll start figuring out how to deal with the theta and probably put on some 20 point out BWBs. A 5% pull back anytime in the next week would put us at a decent profit and allow us to re-adjust the trade or even just exit.

As someone posted in our skype group: All the way back to 1997, we have never had a move of this size without a single pull back. A similar pattern happened in 2013, we moved up 114 points on the QE business but that was as close as was found,and right now we’re up about 145 points. Truly a historic move. The RUT RSI is epic @ 91 and all indicators related are as extreme as you can get. The NYMO is now at 350. The all-time record is 375.

My trades are all down about 5% (15% w/ leverage). I expect an occasional 5% loss. Not worried about that. I am a bit frustrated and kinda demotivated by the challenges of the last 6 months. Starting in August, it’s been a silly environment that’s challenged me at every stop. From the Aug 24 crash, to the subsequent V reversal in October to the 22% fall from Dec 31 till Feb 11 and now I am dealing with a 15% straight rise (without break or consolidation). These challenges and dealing with larger money can suck the life out of you at times but to be fair, it’s been quite extreme environments that should train me to be a more astute trader. I am now looking over my plans to see if I faltered in how I managed the trades. I don’t know. I mean, I did use some technicals to my disadvantage and I guess around 1040 I would have added bit more upside hedges but nothing substantial was warranted. My play by play is that I was at -25 delta when Rut was at 1035. I added some BWBs and calendars, when it touched the 1040 area bringing it back down to the 22-25 delta area. I was satisfied, but then the last 15 minutes, we had a move to 1053 and my delta moved right to -25 delta again. The next day, I was convinced we were about as overbought as we could get and since I was hovering around the limits, I decided to wait for a pullback. The next day I got a little move down and put on a few more upside adjustments, again not much (enough?), RUT moved up again in the last 15-20 minutes to 1063 area. Super overbought. I haven’t really touched it since (a few additions). Now we’re at 1087 and down 5/6% with not a whole lot of upside risk left. Is my plan on waiting for some decent pull-back wrong or am I deer-in-headlights’ing it?? I think the odds of another sustained run is low and the odds of a decent pull-back eventually in the next 5 days is high. Without that much upside risk left, I believe the best is to wait. I mean we are at insane extremes. I continue to be patient as I was during the fall. Maybe this time it catches up with me.

I may even add some bearish butterflies if we touch 1090 🙂

Mar 3 – All Trades Update

The touch of 1073 had me a bit stressed out. My gamma is positive and the loss on a big up move is quite static though significant. We’re now up 14% or so from the Feb 11 bottom (that’s like 2 weeks ago!). Everything is over-heated and I am trying to exercising patience in this up move while still managing risk. I did the same thing on our down moves and it worked out well. These moves are quite historic and really difficult to deal with. The great thing is that the Rhinos I bought back in the 950s were so cheap so that on the up move, it didn’t hurt as bad as it could have. Still from my year ATHs, I am down about 10% on equity and mostly from the move up from 1040 to 1070.

Right now the RUT has dipped to about 1067 now and unfortunately that’s still higher than yesterdays close which was painful in and of itself. I feel that I should throw on a few call BWBs despite waiting for 1055 vs 1075. I wanted to adjust at 1055 and the price of the BWB at that point was about 18.80-19.20 so if I am only paying an extra 70-80c then I’ll take it. I am bothered by the fact that SPX etc is weaker today but RUT continues its strong push up. Even if the expected fall to alleviate extreme NYMO (in SPX) comes to fruition, will RUT fall hard as well? Today, SPX was down what nearly 0.5% and RUT was making new highs at 1073. That’s concerning. So I am thinking I should probably be more prudent with a half upside adjustment.

I looked at the historic pricing of the BWB in OV for the past few days and I’ve got an order in at about 19.90 which I consider a decent price. I went a bit more closer to ATM with this since I have somewhat a market opinion.

1080 BWB pricing

19.75 @ 1062
19.70 @ 1061
19.45 @ 1058
19.20 @ 1057
19.40 @ 1058
18.50 @ 1050
18.05 @ 1048
18.00 @ 1047

1080 Call Calendar Pricing (for comparison)

9.25 @ 1047
9.65 @ 1051
9.95 @ 1062

April Trade Update

Here are my April RHINO positions.

March Unwind – Nearly there

Today was a much better day for unwinding the positions and the subsequent P/L. I have about 15% of the position(s) left. I’ll probably close most of it out tomorrow. They are fairly benign right now–> Really flat. March expiration is finally approaching an end. How relieving. All in all, I am profitable for March (will know by how much once I finally close everything). I was trading quite large since December (a total of about 100-150 units of 5/-10/5 rhinos) and went through a 20% down move in the RUT followed by several 8-12% bounces. So, having had big money on, I got to experience some of the worst conditions while having the stress of a large position. A nice stress test. I mean, since Dec 31st (when I put it on at RUT 1140) it’s been pretty much the worst environment for trading these things, but they ended up doing OK. My maximum balance swing related to equity was about 12-15% in total and always during the highest volatility days. Of course, I am utilizing portfolio margin, this is why I mentioned the swing relative to equity. A few days after a high volatility day, RUT at same price, my balance would be right back to normal. Those are the effects of volatility on option pricing. Anyways, I can deal with that and I pretty much have a skin of steel now. I never felt totally uncomfortable through all of this despite the volatility and that’s a big change from the old modified iron condor days–>especially Aug 24 (I was extremely uncomfortable that day)! Glad I don’t trade that anymore. It must be a very challenging year for condors (well all trades are having difficulties, I see a lot of M3 traders doing poorly right now).

I did learn things I probably won’t do again, first and foremost, I will always close the Rhino structure if it gets challenged rather than trying to hedge it. As well, I’ll probably use upside BWBs as adjustments as opposed to calendars. I didn’t like how the call calendars reacted these past few weeks and I’ll be backtesting some of this later this week.

The bearish butterflies were a beautiful trade this month. They did fantastic. I just closed out most of them for a big profit. I had continued to put these on as hedges all the way down. What I’d do is put them on patiently after every modest bounce and I’d always get fantastic pricing on them and they were resilient on the way back up.

Other than that, I am waiting for a good day to get into the May trades. I didn’t like the pricing on Friday.

EDIT: I closed off my 1040 call calendars for 10.35 today when RUT was at 1040. I paid like 9 something for them at like RUT 1015…really?? I made $1 on it? Not exactly a great hedge to the upside. Anyways, I really got to look at calendars. Right now, I am just going to start using BWBs. It could have been because I put the calendars on late in the month.

Feb 26 – EOD Trade Update

I went ahead and added several 1020/1070/1100 Call BWBs to my April trades. I got the deltas lower and I got my fills at the low of the day (nice) but I am concerned about RUT strength today especially in relation to the April trades. This trade doesn’t love relentless 10%+ rallies and I do have some exposure up top. What especially concerned me was that it was steady down for SPX and even after hours, SPX accelerated its sell off, however, in contrast, RUT moved up and then maintained a narrow trading range and held its gains even after hours. There is some rotation happening and that’s why RUT had strength. This strength going into next week will require more upside adjustments to the April trades and though I got our deltas down for the March trades, they’d prefer a small (or big) down move to close. Any big move up will be somewhat painful across the board.

Feb 26 – Updates

This move up from 950 to 1040 (~11%) in the space of ten trading days has put a damper on both the March and April trades. Especially the 4.5% move in the space of the last 2 days. I am back where I started about 10 days ago, break-even for the year. I guess it’s not a bad result considering the moves and volatility. Just 3 days ago right when I was taking off my call spreads, I was up significantly (5%-6% of equity) and now I’m hovering around $0. Is what it is and the market sometimes does not makes it easy. Any pull back in the next 2-3 weeks will benefit the April trades and we’ll be right back up. I haven’t checked yet, but most of the pain is definitely in the April trades and March theta has offset some of the negative deltas as of late.

April Trades

So for the April trades, I am just about at my delta limits and am looking to buy a modest amount of call BWBs or call calendars to bring the deltas down just a bit. NYMO is extremely over bought, the RUT is sitting at heavy resistance near its Oct and Sep lows, it’s moved nearly 100 points and the volatility in the market is high = I will be a bit more patient with adjustments to the upside. Though it’ll hurt a bit if this turns out to be an Aug 2014 style run to the upside. Any move down to RUT 1035 today, and I’ll be putting more of them on, if it runs from here (1038), I’ll be slower to add as I await some exhaustion and for Monday/Tuesday to see where we stand.

March Trades

This has been some terrible timing for our 21 DTE removal of trades week. Sitting quite health last week to have a 4.5% move right into our most unpreferred area of both the Bearish butterflies and the Rhinos that remained. I had kept removing trades through the last 7-10 trading days but not enough to prevent some pain. I’ve got these deltas under control for now and it looks like I will wait till Monday/Tuesday to get the rest off. Taking off those damn call calendars at RUT 1008 after it touched into the 990s was a huge regret, especially now, that RUT is at 1039! That hurt a bit.

Frustrating week.

March Unwind Update (Feb 25)

Being 22 days to expiry and having this relentless up-move is just plain bad timing with how the structure of the March trades are. I’m giving back some profits in the exit, no doubt.

I got rid of quite a bit today @ 10:30 and I was going to get rid of more at 2:30 but the up move and being negative delta, has definitely hurt and I still have a lot on. I can’t believe I closed 1040 and 1060 call spreads yesterday @ around RUT 1007-1009 only to be at 1030 right now and now I am actually too delta negative…whipsaw and probably over-adjustment. I should have closed the equivalent number of Rhino’s at the same time, hindsight is 20/20. My thought process with the call removals, was that I was positive delta, we had just fallen from 1014 to 995 area and on the bounce to 1007, it was a good opportunity to get rid of some of the call calendars to put me close to neutral or slightly negative. I’d then start to remove Rhinos towards EOD and on Thurs/Fri. What ended up happening is a very swift move from the 990s to 1030s in the course of 4-5 market hours (4%?). Frustrating.

On the SPX side, I closed the entire SPX Rhino @ 1.80 credit (I paid 1.60 debit). We got a great price for it and it was bearish leaning so it was a good time to get rid of it. IT was a trade recommended by Brian Larson back a few weeks ago.

The March Unwind

I started unwinding some of my March trades today by peeling off the lower Rhinos and Bearish butterflies. I was surprised to see how fast my deltas got negative again. I was at limits on all the March trades yet again. I ended Friday quite comfortably but today I surely was not.

I tried to peel some off in the first 5 minutes when the RUT was @ 1018 but that didn’t last long and the RUT proceeded up to about 1026 area. My plan at that point was to wait for a slight decline or until 2:30pm to do an adjustment. I got a little pullback, RUT fell down to the 1021 area and I started peeling off my lower bearish butterflies (910s, 920s) and my lower rhinos (910s) and added some 1060 call calendar hedges as a temporary hedge as I start to peel the entire structure off bit by bit in the next 5 trading days.

All in all, the March Rhino trades will probably go down as some of the most challenging trades I’ve done and will likely ever do. I entered them on Dec 31st at RUT 1150 and experienced a 200 point fall starting almost immediately on Jan 4th down to about 950 only to have it rebound several times by 7-8% in between. That’s volatility I guess. My result? Profitable. Happy about that I guess, but I found myself dreading trading a bit because of the wild swings. One big take away was my risk management, I thought it was the best I’ve done despite some over adjustments and also lack there of through-out.

April Trade Updates

Below are three sets of Rhino trades for April for three different accounts of mine. There are multiple tranches in each and the risk profile is a combination of several. I am not going to do any upside adjustments to any unless RUT breaches 1035 with authority.

I started also putting on a new type of hedge trade called a “Space trip Trade” developed by Ron Bertino. This is essentially what ends up being a free hedge for large down moves but can also be an income trade in portfolio margin accounts where it takes very little margin. If the market stays neutral or falls, it’ll profit. The upside has little risk (-$600) and a 17% fall would produce 24k in about 4 months. The idea is to put on multiple tranches of this with both time and price diversity. It takes time for the profit hump to build and entering these periodically and @ different times and market positions, we should be able to get a nice hedge for our ATM trades like the Rhino and also produce some income on them as well. As time builds, we can remove our upside risk by rolling up the shorts a bit.

Here is what I have on below: